

Now, the Soxhlet extractor is used whenever exhaustive extractions are needed, particularly in the oil and food industries. Also, the Soxhlet extractor can run continuously without any further operation, making it an excellent choice for extracting compounds over hours or even days.įranz Ritter von Soxhlet first invented the apparatus to extract lipids (fats) from milk solids. This means that much less solvent is used in a Soxhlet extraction, making it more time and cost effective. Unlike a traditional extraction method, a small amount of solvent is reused to perform an extraction many times. 1) Stirrer bar/anti-bumping granules 2) Extraction pot (round bottom flask) 3) Distillation path 4) Soxhlet Thimble 5) Extraction solid 6) Syphon arm inlet 7) Syphon arm outlet 8) Reduction adapter 9) Condenser 10) Cooling water out 11) Cooling water in Why use it? Piperine will start crystallizing.Image user left Daniele Pugliesi, right user Elrond. Now, perform vacuum filtration and take out as much paste as you can.Īdd a small amount of isopropyl alcohol and allow it to stand for a few hours or days. So, now we are going to add water and immediately, the piperine starts coming out and the mixture gets cloudy. Remember that piperine does not react with KOH and it also hates water. This will make all the impurities water-soluble. The acids, fats that were extracted along with piperine will react with KOH. Now add this KOH mixture to our previous solvent mixture. For that, add 1g of KOH to 10 ml of isopropyl alcohol. Perform simple distillation to get rid of most of the isopropyl alcohol. To separate these things, first, start with isopropyl alcohol.

Now start the extraction process as mentioned previously.Īt the end of the procedure, we will be left with isopropyl alcohol + peperine + other isopropyl alcohol-soluble components. But remember that the powder consistency should be granular and not too fine. Put the black pepper powder inside the thimble. So, we use isopropyl alcohol as a solvent.Īs mentioned in the working of the soxhlet extractor, we set up the assembly. We will see how the extraction process works for a better understanding of Soxhlet extraction.īlack pepper contains piperine which is soluble in isopropyl alcohol. The process is more comfortable and safer. We use the soxhlet extractor for a variety of applications, one of which is piperine extraction from black pepper. Compared with the other glass extractor tube, the extraction tube kit made of glass can make the operation visualized. the sample (1:1) may make the mixture amenable to grinding. Now, we can separate them by the further procedure. and extracted using an appropriate solvent in a Soxhlet extractor.Now we are left with the mixture of solvent and the components from the sample which are soluble in the solvent. If you want to get THC, the choice of extraction solvent is very important. When we think that we have exhausted the sample sufficiently, we stop the cycles.So, each time we get 100% pure solvent vapors. And despite that, when the solvent vaporizes, the components from the sample do not get vaporized. One thing to mention is, we don’t change the solvent for every cycle.As I mentioned earlier, we can perform as many cycles as we want.Since the Siphon directly connects RBF, the overflowed liquid falls back to RBF.A point reaches where the siphon starts overflowing under the influence of gravity. The solvent mixture starts filling thimble and siphon. Siphon connects the thimble to RBF as we saw earlier.So, when the condensed vapors fall into the thimble, the powder gets wet with the solvent and the components which are soluble in the solvent gets along with it.The powder has to be covered from the bottom with a cotton ball to avoid powder directly falling into the thimble. We put our sample powder inside the thimble.The condenser condenses the vapors of solvent and those condensed vapors fall down to thimble.The vapors from the RBF travel from RBF to the condenser via the distillation tube.The RBF which contains our solvent starts boiling.First we turn on the heat and the metal plate gets heated.

It’s okay if other components are soluble too because we can separate them later. Then only we would be able to separate it from other components. Referring to this diagram, let’s see how the soxhlet extractor works.įirst, we need to understand that, the desired component from the sample powder must be soluble in the solvent at high temperatures.
